“(Note: I read the Brazilian portuguese translation and I'm pretty sure some of the details were lost in the (very poor) translation)
"Marley & Me" is a pretty awesome book. "Bad Dogs Have More Fun" is far away form it. The book is a collection of some of Grogan columns in the newspapers, in no particular order and without trying to build a story. Also, it is pretty clear in this book that, for Grogan, he is the main character in "Marley & Me", not Marley.
The translation to portuguese is extremely weak, in my opinion. I hate when translator take the liberty of changing the story to fit some local thing (for example, instead of use the author's country common food dish, the translator use some local food; or, as it is more common in such poor translations, changing cities names when the author is using them as an analogy to a distance [for example, the original says "like walking from Sydney to Perth" and the translator translate it to "like walking from Iapoque to Chui"]).
But, back to the book: Again, it is a collection of Grogan's column in the newspaper, in chronological order, with some topics. Oh, you loved "Marley & Me" because of the dog, right? Well, although there is "Dog" in the title of this book, there are very few stories about dogs. Actually, there is no actual reason for calling it "Bad Dogs Have More Fun", except that one of columns mention something around those lines. What about the rest? Some stories about people who opened some business, catch a ride with the author and such (and it becomes even more misleading in the translated version, because they completely dropped the sub-title.)”
Julio B wrote this review Friday, April 25 2008.
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